Goodbye JobGrid

I started JobGrid mid of 2014 when I was based in Vietnam. The idea of JobGrid was, to build a job board for user-groups, barcamps and conferences, where each community would be part of a global job network. Companies would be able to post a job for fee, which supports the activities and goals of those communities. JobGrid would earn a fee on top of it. A win-win-win situation in theory.

We were a team of 5 people who built a MVP in about 2 months. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to pursue the idea much further at that point, since personal priorities had changed, which caused me moving back to Germany by the end of 2014.

I changed jobs, and after six months went by it was time to give JobGrid another try in mid of 2015. Since the MVP was done already, it was primarily a matter of signing up user groups and trying to add jobs to the platform.

Our first "real" test run was the "UX Camp Hamburg", which was pretty awesome. I'm still more than happy that the organiser team was giving me the opportunity to do a real world check. And it went pretty well overall. I signed up a few more user-groups in Germany and Asia over the course of the following weeks.

While talking to the organisers and parts of their communities it turned out to be a very difficult environment to do business in. Since most of these communities are self organised groups, it's pretty hard to just give somebody some money. Most of the activities are sponsored by companies, which are an umbrella for the event they're hosting at the same time. So, even though most of the communities could really use the money, they were just not able to take it in a lawful way. I'm pretty sure there would be ways to get around these issues, but it would include lots of fancy legal workarounds which I wasn't willing to pursue.

Another general issue was the negative perception of paid job ads in the environment of volunteer tech community work. There was some very vocal negative feedback from parts of those communities against the idea.

Overall, these learnings led me to the decision to switch off JobGrid by the end of 2015 and free my mind up for new adventures to come.